


Haunted Heads

by Tawabids



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Discussions of dub/non-con, Discussions of mental illness, M/M, Mind Control
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-12
Updated: 2012-09-12
Packaged: 2017-11-14 02:15:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/510241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tawabids/pseuds/Tawabids
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Here's the story," Clint said, "We were scoping the joint, me and Agent Coulson, and next thing I know I'm strapped to a chair and that evil bastard is trying to offer me a job, and he said he'd give me Coulson as payment, and then twenty minutes ago Coulson kissed me, <i>on the mouth</i>, so Tony can you <i>please</i> make sure he's not being mind-controlled?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Haunted Heads

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for [this kinkmeme prompt.](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/10266.html?thread=21724954#t21724954>this%20prompt</a>%20at%20the%20kinkmeme</a>.)

Tony leaned back and waved his hands in front of his face like the lab suddenly had a mosquito problem. “Wait, wait, wait, start again. Why do we,” he pointed at Bruce and himself, “need to know that Coulson,” he pointed at Phil and Clint, “kissed you on the mouth?”

“Oh, my God,” Coulson covered his face.

“Because brainwashing, Tony!” Clint cried, flinging his hands towards Coulson. “Brainwashing! What part of this is so hard to understand?”

Bruce put his hand on Clint’s shoulder. “You’re going to have to start at the beginning, Clint.”

~~~

_Nineteen hours earlier_

“Leave us,” said Macintyre. The suited goons at the door glanced at each other, and one went to check that the leather straps holding Clint to the chair were still tied bone-achingly tight.

“Go on, give us a kiss before you go,” Clint puckered up at the goon and received a backhanded slap in return. The minions sidled out and Clint heard the door close behind them, echoing around the empty basement of the mansion. It wasn’t a dank, dripping hole like a few Clint had been chained up in before: new carpets and a flat screen TV bolted to the wall suggested somebody’s intentions as a games room. Upstairs, Clint could hear the vague pounding of music and the creak of footsteps. He and Coulson had been using the party as their cover, but unfortunately for Clint, one of Macintyre's guests had a good memory for faces. Especially for the face of a SHIELD agent who'd put an arrow through the heart of his favourite lieutenant. 

Macintyre made a slow circuit of the room in his ten thousand dollar tuxedo, sipping at a glass of something brown. Clint thought whiskey. He’d never been good with spirits. They all tasted like someone had ripped you off when you bought it.

“Please, relax, Mr Barton,” said Macintyre, touching Clint’s shoulder with the tips of his fingers. Clint tried to flinch away and the straps held him fast from neck to ankle. “You’re quite safe here. In fact, you should consider yourself headhunted. In a good way,” he arrived directly in front of the chair and leaned forward with a smile. “I’d like to offer you a job.”

“Keep talking,” said Clint. That was the key, after all. When they were talking, they weren’t cutting into you or anyone else, they weren’t blowing up buildings or selling opium to the masses or inviting alien invaders into the white house or whatever other stunt the fuckers had come up with to keep the Avengers busy this week.

“You’ve probably heard of my work,” said Macintyre, draining the last of the as yet unknown spirit and walking to the door to put down the glass. He spread his arms like a priest welcoming Clint into the church. “I correct people. Their errors, their crossed wires, their miscalculations.”

Clint knew the basics, or as basic as Tony could be bothered to bring the science down to. Until five years ago Macintyre had been the poster boy for benevolent wealth; using a fortune he’d made in the housing market, he’d bought, bartered or poached brilliant researchers from across the globe to cure all forms of disabling mental illness. They had opened up new directions in schizophrenia, bipolar syndrome and depression, all based on “epidermal microchips” – bits of computer stuck under your skin, Tony clarified, that fixed whatever you didn’t like about your brain. Then the economy had tanked and Macintyre’s facility collapsed like a card house.

Bankrupt and pursued by accusations about the ethics of his clinical trials, Macintyre had disappeared – until SHIELD had sniffed him out selling _something_ to a Latverian terrorist organisation. What exactly terrorists wanted with schizophrenia cures was a very interesting question, but not one Clint and Coulson had been sent to answer. They were supposed to scope out one of the residences that Macintyre had been linked to. They had not expected the man himself to be home.

“Miscalculations?” Clint asked, trying to surreptitiously loosen the bands around his ankles. “I wasn’t aware depression was just a bad call.”

“Oh, no, no, no, my chips are so much more than that,” Macintyre hummed. He smoothed his dyed, golden hair back from his forehead. “One day, yes, I will have the resources to go back to my work on human illnesses. One day I will quash that epidemic of suffering. But we discovered something else, Mr Barton, before this sick, stupid world shut down my lab. We found a way to help the smart people...” he started to pace again, lost in the glory of his own monologue, “...steer the minds of the misguided. These – these _imbeciles_ that run this country, that are plowing it into the ground, imagine if we could simply flick a switch and turn them onto the right path. Imagine, Mr Barton!” he raised his hands, his face beaming.

Clint started to laugh, tipping his head back. “Mind control. You’re talking about mind control.”

“You have some experience with it, yes, I’ve heard _everything_ about you,” Macintyre was suddenly very close, almost breathing into Clint’s face. He wanted to spit into the bastard’s eye, but if he could get enough intel out of the babbling megalomaniac then maybe they could bring this whole operation down in record time. “You must see the potential. You must see how straightforward things become. We can end wars, Mr Barton, all wars, forever. We can end crime, corruption, hatred itself. With the right people in charge,” he was definitely breathing on Clint’s face now. Ugh. Sonofa--

 _Keep him talking,_ Clint told himself. Coulson would be calling for backup right now. Clint just had to be patient.

“So why do you need me?” Clint asked, with as little spitting-in-Macintyre’s-face as possible.

The man stepped back at last. “The research is not complete,” he said in a heavy tone. “The chip works on some subjects, yes. It sits invisible against the back of the skull, covered by the hairline. But we need a precise, long-distance delivery system to try it on someone who really _matters_ , someone who has a reason to fight back – men like you, Mr Barton, seem to have some resistance, and it’s even worse when the subject is going about their normal business,” he shrugged. “We’ll make adjustments once we have the relevant data. But you can’t walk up to the mayor of New York and stick a metal spike into the back of his head without being noticed, no matter how small the spike. My people are working on a silent, air-powered rifle that can be disguised as a camera, but it’s hopelessly inaccurate even in the hands of my most trained professionals,” Macintyre smiled at his own genius. “You will no doubt have some modifications that should improve the mechanism, and your skills will certainly be required for the application itself. You will, I assure you, be compensated beyond your wildest imaginations.”

“I already have a job,” Clint raised his eyebrows. The straps on his ankles were starting to feel very roomy. That was the problem with warm leather. It tended to be generous. _Come on, Coulson, where’s my goddamn backup?_ “And I doubt you can beat Tony Stark in a bidding war.”

“Oh, I’m not talking about money,” Macintyre said breezily. He reached into his pocket for a small remote and thumbed it. The flatscreen buzzed to life, displaying a damn good quality feed from a security camera somewhere on the grounds of the house. A hidden security camera, Clint thought, because there was no way Coulson would have missed it otherwise.

He was still on the grounds. Clint balled his fists. The idiot hadn’t gone to safety after calling backup, he had his gun out and was holed up behind the garage, presumably waiting for the regular patrol to emerge so he could slip in through the back door. Of all the fucking, stupid, reckless… what was Coulson _thinking?_ That he was going to walk in here and get Clint out all by himself?

“Sweet, isn’t he?” Macintyre smiled, glancing at Clint. “As I said, I heard everything about you, Mr Barton. I have a friend inside SHIELD – well, when I say a friend, I mean, you know,” he tapped the back of his head to indicate one of his shitty little microchips. “Anyway, Agent Coulson is going to be joining us very soon, as you can probably guess. And I wanted to give you a demonstration of our most recent prototype. I know you want to see this,” Macintyre waved the remote at the screen as Coulson slipped out of shot. Macintyre pressed another button and suddenly they were inside the garage, where Coulson had slid past a bodyguard and was crouched over behind a car watching the men at the house entrance.

“Don’t you touch him,” said Clint through gritted teeth. “If you even think about hurting him, you’ll never get anything from me-”

“Mr Barton! Clint! You’re entirely missing the point!” Macintyre cried genially, like a loving father. He stepped up until he was looming over Clint. “I don’t want to hurt him. I want to give him to you. As a gift,” he draped his arm around Clint’s shoulders. “My friend tells me about how you look at him. How you _pine_ for him. Work for me,” his face was inches from Clint’s now, the pupils blown in his eyes, his two-day stubble showing on his chin. His voice dropped seductively low, “and he will love you, Mr Barton. Oh, how he will love you. In any and every way that you need. He will never look at another man or woman, he will never betray you or grow bored with you. He will be there with you every night. You will see every secret that he has never shown you, that he _will_ never show, not without my gift.”

Clint was breathing fast and heavy through his nose. He couldn’t unlock his jaw at first. He couldn’t look away from Macintyre’s face, and worse than that he couldn’t escape the images that Macintyre had conjured, all the fantasies that he’d played with on plenty of nights alone in bed, of Coulson—of _Phil_. And overtop of those fantasies was now playing a looping soundtrack of Loki laughing, of Loki saying, _heart – heart – you have -_ over and over again.

Through the screaming inside his head he finally managed to answer. “I would die before I so much as touched his hand without knowing he wanted it.”

\---

Bruce and Tony were sitting absolutely (miraculously, in Tony’s case) silent. Bruce’s mouth was hanging open just a little. Coulson’s arms were folded and he was looking at the ceiling like it had a friggin’ renaissance mural up there.

“So what happened then?” Bruce demanded.

Clint shrugged, “Then I head butted him into unconsciousness, slipped the straps on my ankles, managed to flick his knife into my hand with a good kick and by the time I found Coulson in the upstairs hallway, backup had arrived and they arrested everyone in the house.”

Tony joined two imaginary points in the air with his fingertips. “So now you think – what? - that Macintyre already put the chip in Coulson’s skull? And he’s all goo-gaa for you because of mind control?” 

"Yes! You need to do a - a scan or - whatever science stuff you two do! You need to find out what's wrong with him!"

Tony narrowed his eyes at Coulson. “Are you being mind controlled right now? Because you seem really not mind controlled. I guess that’s the whole point of a chip in the president’s brain, right? That no one can tell?”

“I am absolutely not mind controlled,” Coulson said firmly, propping his hand on his hips. “Agent Barton has left out the part of the story where we were both cleared by SHIELD medical and then debriefed by Fury. In great detail,” he cocked his head pointedly at Clint. “I heard the entire report in the early hours of this morning, I just didn't get a chance to talk to you about it because you seem to have been avoiding me."

"I _was_ avoiding you, sir," Clint folded his arms. "It's rather humiliating, having to confess something like that. I was trying not to make you uncomfortable. I wouldn't want to jeopordise our professional relationship. Sir."

"Agent Barton," Coulson closed his eyes and shook his head quickly. "Clint. All that stuff you told Fury? About your goo-gaa feelings? I already knew that.”

Clint stared at him. “Did you, sir?”

“For some time, yes.”

“Then why haven’t you done anything about it?”

“I just did. Twenty minutes ago. That’s how we ended up here, in the lab, with Doctor Banner and Iron Man acting as your agony aunts.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t prove you’re not—” 

Coulson took two steps to cross the space between them, grabbed Clint’s face in both hands and kissed him. It wasn’t really different from the kiss in the hallway of twenty minutes ago, except that it was. In the hallway it had been a slice out of one of Clint’s fantasies, one of the rare ones that weren’t R-rated, where they suddenly found themselves alone together and there had been the sparkle of the New York lights and a single button undone in Coulson’s collar, and Coulson's scent had filled Clint's lungs, it had been perfect – and that had made it so wrong, because that was what Macintyre had offered him, that perfect thing that he didn’t and could never have –

This time, it was in front of Bruce and Tony, under blinding halogen bulbs, in the lab that always smelled of solder, ammonia and spilled coffee going dry on the concrete. It was the exact opposite of romantic. And it was still happening. Coulson was kissing him. In front of Tony. In front of Tony’s _tech testing cameras_. 

Clint’s nerves rippled from lips to toes and he kissed back. There was quite a lot of tongue. When Clint surfaced, Bruce was covering his eyes.

Clint didn’t really give a shit. Bruce covered his eyes when Tony and Pepper were in the kitchen macking on each other, too. Clint just stared at Coulson. Who had kissed him. On the _mouth_. 

“Sir?”

“Yes, Barton?”

“Would you mind doing something that wasn’t in any of my fantasies? To set my mind at ease?”

Coulson glanced at Bruce, who was peeking between his fingers now. “That depends what it is.”

“Would you go to dinner with me?”

Coulson smiled. Reality, thought Clint, was considerably better than anything he had imagined. “Yes, I would.”

As Coulson cleared his throat and turned to go, Clint reached up and ran his hand through Coulson’s thinning hair, just above the back of his neck. Coulson twitched and spun with a glare. “Agent Barton!”

“I’m checking for epidermal microchips!”

Coulson narrowed his eyes. “Very well. But I do not expect you to make this,” he indicated the room in general, “a habit. Understand?”

“Yes, sir,” grinned Clint. “Whatever you want, sir.”


End file.
